Philip Cross Madness Part IV 510


Mike Barson, keyboard player of the great ska group Madness, had his Wikipedia entry amended by “Philip Cross” to delete his membership of Momentum and interview with The Canary.

This apparently trivial incident raises an important question. How does the “Philip Cross” Wikipedia monitoring operation work? “Cross”‘s systematic attack on Momentum and The Canary is a matter of record, and his twitter feed proves it is motivated by a visceral hatred of the anti-war movement. But how would “Cross” discover that a reference to Momentum had turned up somewhere as improbable as the page of a member of Madness?

To get this by Google just would not work – try it yourself if you don’t know it relates to Barson, to Madness, or anything about them. To do a daily Wikipedia site specific Google search for the word Momentum might get you there after hours of effort. Are there tools within Wikipedia itself that could alert “Cross” to this sort of reference being added anywhere on Wikipedia, and if so are they available to the general public?

A number of people have opined in reply to my posts that the time spent to make all of Cross’s daily edits, as per the number of keystrokes, is not great. That ignores the colossal effort that goes into research and above all monitoring of Wikipedia by the “Philip Cross” operation.

Finally, this is an excellent example of the bias of Wikipedia. The information about Barson is totally true. He is a proud member of Momentum. It is also quite interesting and an important bit of his life. But according to Wikipedia’s pro-MSM rules, “Philip Cross” can indeed delete it because the information is not from an MSM source. In the unlikely event of the Times or Telegraph ever writing about Barson’s Momentum membership, it would of course be in a hostile attack to which “Philip Cross” could then link.

I hope you are understanding the Jimmy Wales methodology by now.

So, to add to the mysteries of how “Philip Cross” works every waking hour, never takes a single day off and is followed on Twitter by few people but including half of Fleet Street, we can add the mystery of how he has omniscience of left wing references appearing in unlikely places on Wikipedia. Go figure.


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510 thoughts on “Philip Cross Madness Part IV

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  • Declan Hayes

    For an indication of how this works, download my book in PDF, epub or mobi format at wesavesyria.com/FIGHT
    and wordsearch Bickerton who is mentioned on the the blog of BobFromBrockley, who is the side kick of Philip Cross and who many like Neil Clark believe to be a prominent lecturer at the University of London.
    Spoiler: Bickerton picks up the dirt on people like me, you, Galloway etc, “researches” a little, writes up the piece and then places it in the MSM outlet of choice, who then make a few (pre-arranged) phone calls to the “authorities” of choice to round off the hit piece. They made two important mistakes in my case
    1. I was monitoring Bickerton so I knew the chain from the street thugs up to the media and politicians via him.
    2. When the journalist emailed me for my response, he forgot to change a few words (eg Hayes to you). His questions and accompanying comments were taken word for word from right wing Tory Bickerton

  • John Spencer-Davis

    Actually, the question of how Philip Cross discovered this reference is not a difficult one to solve. The reference was added by someone interested in Barson the same day the interview came out, 19/09/2016. Philip Cross removed it four days later, 23/09/2016. Given that Cross apparently hates alternative media like Media Lens and The Canary so much, he probably read it in the Canary, and decided to have a look and remove it.

    What is rather more chilling is that he did it at all. Barson seems an amiable sort and his entry isn’t really about politics. The only effect of the addition may be perhaps to raise Barson’s profile, which seems wholly unobjectionable. In this case, could he not have simply left Barson alone?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mike_Barson&type=revision&diff=740220827&oldid=725239491

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mike_Barson&type=revision&diff=740804263&oldid=740220827

    • craig Post author

      That doesn’t strike me as a simple explanation John. It would mean he reads all the articles in Canary and then cross-references them to Wikipedia to see if anyone has entered anything from them. That would itself be a huge amount of work; remember the Canary is only one of scores of left wing web outlets he detests.

      • John Spencer-Davis

        Perhaps, but of course not all articles in The Canary &c are about notable people: of if they are, they are likely to be about political figures, which would presumably be bread and butter to Cross. Quoting a rock star would be sufficiently unusual to stick out, in my opinion.

      • Sopo

        If you set up a google alert for particular keywords, ‘momentum’, ‘the canary’, etc. one will get emails whenever relevant material is indexed by google. This is one method of keeping tabs on paryicular individuals/topics. You should try this yourself, Craig, with ‘Craig Murray’ as the keywords.

        • craig Post author

          Yes, but if you did it for Momentum you would get deluged with hundreds every day, mostly unrelated to politics.

          • CartorIron

            You have it the wrong way around and its leading you down the wrong path. Its very simple what is happening.

            Cross is paid by his ‘followers’ to modify wiki pages on their behalf.

            He does NOT spend day and night trawling google, the canary, media lens etc etc for articles on dissenting voices so he can then wait day and night on thier respective pages in case they are edited.

            His ”followers” (ie professional ”journalists”) will come across these articles over the course of THEIR work day, and contact Cross to be alert that a possible edit/addition of article x from source x will be added to wiki page x. If this does happen, Cross will remove or modify the additional information as per his emplyers instruction and be paid for it.

            200+ ‘professionals’ use Cross. That is a lot of eyes and ears. A lot of axes to grind.

            And yes users on wiki can set up alerts to when a page is edited. They then go to page and sees edit made. If it is ”the edit” he has been employed to modify on his ‘followers’ behalf, he modifies accordingly.

            Cross also stated on his own bio he is an atheist. This is probably why he worked on Christmas day. Its just another day to him. You need to see things from ‘Philips’ (his name is actually Andrew as others point out) perspective. And also take some time to understand how these sites and their various ‘tools’ actually work in their entirety ie alert systems etc. Basic stuff that you do not understand has you looking a little puzzled.

            Was this the ‘big one’ you where all excited about in your last post? or something else?

          • craig Post author

            I did not say anything about “the big one”, you are mis-recalling something. It is an interestng theory but is it from personal knowledge or do you surmise?

          • CartorIron

            Actually craig you should book a day at one of those ‘zionist’ Wikipedia training days. Learn from the best…….

          • Shatnersrug

            Hi craig,

            You may be right but Occam’s razor suggests Mr Cross edits wiki for clients whether he has a team or not is irrelevant, why is he followed by all the people he edits favourably? It speaks for itself. The big question here is that Mr Wales is effectively the boss of these people. Check Polly Toynbee’s wiki, edited by cross. By denying this happens Mr Wales is looks like he is using wiki to help his current job.

          • Simon

            Craig I may be telling you stuff you know already, but you can google search a specific site using the “site” operator…

            momentum site:.wikipedia.org
            …will give you occurences of momentum on wikipedia. Save that search on google, and you will get daily emails of new occurrences. Could be interesting for someone, and no special tools required.

            The scandal for me lies in the fact that an account purporting to belong to an individual hides a level and type of usage beyond the scope of one person, and, more importantly, when questions arise, there’s not a warm-bodied person willing to step forward and own the edits.

          • Sopo

            Craig, you are speaking without having tried it. For example, i set up an alert for ‘The Canary’ and it’s extremely fruitful with only a few irrelevant results. Furthermore, one can flag irrelevant matches and google uses your feedback to improve the filter.

      • Squeeth

        Perhaps PC is the title of a clearing-house and the donkey work is done by other people.

  • Mark Rowantree

    I think you do ‘Mr Cross’ a serious disservice as what need has a man for rest and sustenance, when he is about the Lord’s work. Of course, in this example one could question the nature of his dominus.

  • Jack

    Great job,

    I sense as many others that this is clearly a perception/psychological warfare unit by brittish intelligence.

    Here we have a troll-factory obviously but it is apparently not important since there are no russians involved. Disgusting but shows the bias of the media, once again.

    What we can do now is probably not much, but that this propaganda group has been exposed mean they wont be as powerful anymore.

    Also, how many other propaganda groups do these people have?

  • Neil

    Craig – In the panel on the left-hand side of any Wikipedia article, there is a drop-down menu “Tools”. You might enjoy having a play with some of those. As a Wikipedia editor, I make frequent use of “what links here” and “related changes”.

  • sugges

    It probably works in the same way hasbara “trolling for Shekels” call centers get a “ping” every time “israel” is mentioned on the internet.

  • Sharp Ears

    LOL

    ‘Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17111857
    notahacker 2 days ago | parent | favorite | on: A Wikipedia editor’s long-running campaign

    ‘I’ve interacted with Philip Cross many times (UK politics Wikipedia is a very small place) and found him perfectly reasonable and his edits usually well justified.
    Needless to say, an anonymous critic launching a campaign complete with website and Twitter account against him for allegedly being unfair to conspiracy-mongering figures like Craig Murray and George Galloway and genocide denial specialist Neil Clark and too nice to two Jewish journalists (one considerably more outspokenly pro-Israel than the other) isn’t about to change my mind… ‘

    • bj

      Anybody can say “I’ve interacted with Philip Cross many times”.
      It is authority by proxy.

    • Squeeth

      PC has to cleave to the Wiki rules more than he used to because his egregious edits were too easy to challenge. My experience of him is that he embodies the judge’s summing up in the Lipstadt trial. Where he can give the benefit of the doubt to neo-fascist politicals he does and when his subject is an enemy of the US empire he doesn’t. He can he can heap up references and citations from the corp-0-rat media and the state broadcaster because Wiki recognises establishment propaganda journals and rags like the Gran and the NYT as reliable sources.

  • Sharp Ears

    LOL

    ‘Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17111857
    notahacker 2 days ago | parent | favorite | on: A Wikipedia editor’s long-running campaign

    ‘I’ve interacted with Philip Cross many times (UK politics Wikipedia is a very small place) and found him perfectly reasonable and his edits usually well justified.
    Needless to say, an anonymous critic launching a campaign complete with website and Twitter account against him for allegedly being unfair to conspiracy-mongering figures like Craig Murray and George Galloway and genocide denial specialist Neil Clark and too nice to two J**ish journalists (one considerably more outspokenly pro-Israel than the other) isn’t about to change my mind… ‘

    • Je

      “conspiracy-mongering figures”, ” genocide denial specialist”… well, you’re not sounding like the voice of calm measurement dispassionate discernment to me…

  • Intel Today

    In July 2007, I concluded that a person — using the ‘SlimVirgin’ pseudonym — was editing sensitive information on Wikipedia. ‘SlimVirgin’ real name was Linda Mack, a person who had been strongly suspected of being an agent or an informant of a Western Intelligence Agency. Two weeks later, I provided incontrovertible evidence that several Intel Agencies, including the CIA, had indeed edited sensible information on Wikipedia. In an interview with George Galloway, journalist Neil Clark explains that ‘SlimVirgin’ is back and teaming up with ‘Philip Cross’. That is subtle or what? Wikipedia & the Spooks — Intel Today

    The Remake? [The Philip Cross Affair]
    https://gosint.wordpress.com/2018/05/22/wikipedia-the-spooks-the-remake-the-philip-cross-affair/

  • Clark

    ‘“Philip Cross” can indeed delete it because the information is not from an MSM source’

    Yes, that is indeed one of the major ways in which Wikipedia becomes biased. Material added to Wikipedia must be supported by “reliable sources” or it can be removed. “Reliable sources” are meant to be those which do fact checking, or will publish corrections if found to be in error, or can in some way be held to account for publishing inaccuracies. In social and political fields, this in turn leads back to press regulation, and libel and defamation laws, which themselves are biased towards those with wealth.

    • Ian

      The major takeaway from Craig’s pieces is that Wikipedia, when it comes to political content, is an echo chamber for the MSM. So Murdoch newspapers and other oligarch outlets can print their usual litany of lies and distortions, and then have them preserved as ‘fact’ in Wiki. What a perfect circle jerk. And now, what a perfect reason to ignore anything in Wiki outside of its non-political content. Wales has really damaged the whole idea of Wiki, as other social media have done with their original utopian idealism, now a sorry relic of an innocent age.

    • Clark

      Here’s one of my edits changing “harsh interrogation” to “interrogation under torture”:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Criticism_of_the_9/11_Commission&diff=661171589&oldid=661170467

      From the article’s History, you can see that (1) I didn’t log in and (2) I made umpteen little changes as I hammered that section into my preferred form, the latter a criticism also levelled at Cross:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Criticism_of_the_9/11_Commission&offset=&limit=500&action=history

      (cur | prev) 23:14, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,590 bytes) (-8)‎ . . (→‎Able Danger: “Further information” to “Main article”) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 23:12, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,598 bytes) (+122)‎ . . (→‎Redacted section: Add Main Article link) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 23:07, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,476 bytes) (+64)‎ . . (→‎Harsh interrogation: “Harsh interrogation” to “torture”) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 22:56, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,412 bytes) (-585)‎ . . (→‎Harsh interrogation: “Citation needed” fixed.) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 22:51, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,997 bytes) (+653)‎ . . (Undid revision 661169210 – start again to do it right) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 22:44, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,344 bytes) (-653)‎ . . (→‎Harsh interrogation: Tidied duplicate citations) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 22:40, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,997 bytes) (+698)‎ . . (→‎Harsh interrogation: Removed “citation needed”, added citations) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 22:29, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,299 bytes) (+4)‎ . . (→‎Harsh interrogation: Add Wikilink) (undo)
      (cur | prev) 22:22, 6 May 2015‎ 87.114.174.210 (talk)‎ . . (24,295 bytes) (+118)‎ . . (→‎Redacted section: Add Wikilink) (undo)

      Blowing my own trumpet a bit, my edit has remained since 2005, so sometimes, it seems, it is worth making the effort.

      • Clark

        Oops: – “my edit has remained since 2015.

        Now if this place worked like Wikipedia, I could have edited to correct my own mistake. Was I subconsciously trying to big myself up by adding a decade to the longevity of my edit? I’ll never know; all I can do is issue a correction, hopefully before someone else accuses me of bias. And that too serves my own reputation; there’s no escape bar death.

        • Squeeth

          Articles about contemporary times are far more vulnerable to malicious editing than the field I plough in Flanders. Refuting the constant pressure is a full-time job, which isn’t worth it for an individual. The way to defeat the frauds is to organise like them and beat them at their own game by becoming adept in a fairly narrow field and combining with other adepts to increase the quality of articles. There’s a setting in “Preferences” > “Appearance” > “Display an assessment of an article’s quality in its page header”. Tick it and you’ll see an assessment of quality by a colour coded article title and a description underneath.

  • Shatnersrug

    Well Mike did an interview with Mr Topple of the canary and it got tweeted around by 1/3 of a million Labour Party members, so the chances of Mr Cross *not* seeing it are pretty scarce.

    I think the answer is staring us in the face

    1)Jimmy Wales is a Director of the Guardian
    2)Guardian employees get there wiki pages cleaned up by Cross
    3) Cross edits the pages of those that are critical of the guardian and those on the left
    4) Jimmy Wales denies it and demands evidence
    5) when given evidence by Craig he blocks him

    From those facts it’s a not much a leap to suggest that Mr Wales is looking after his own, it seems Mr Cross offers this service to various journalists and political figures beyond the guardian but very much with in the establishment.

    It’s certainly a misuse of his influence. That’s just speculation, however I think there might a case of occums razor here. Whether there are state actors or not. The wiki Scandal ought to be enough to bring down Mr Wales. However The guardian aren’t going to touch it are they? And Mr Cross has done enough non journalists for them to want to make a fuss.

    Wow! What a story!

  • Bob Dixon

    Does the “Phillip Cross” activity coincide with Wikipedia solving its funding problems? Did it get funding from anti left groups?

    • J

      If all of this is so, wikipedia would probably need to issue periodic funding drives even if it were flush, for PR, to preserve the essential air of impartial social critique, Diogenes sitting in his pot.

  • kashmiri

    Craig: No mystery here for anyone who edited Wikipedia: (1) Adding an article to own Watchlist will send alerts on others linking to it. (2) There is a link “What links here” on every Wikipedia article – it is rather easy to check regularly what currently links to Momentum.

    • craig Post author

      Kashmiri thank you. But there was no reason for him to add Mr Barson to a watchlist. Did the article link to Momentum? If so, that he monitors every article linking to Momentum is certainly possible if there is a tool for that. But again it would not be only Momentum but many left wings orgs, and would still be a great deal of work. We are not talking of someone who is only monitoring Momentum.

      • J

        Even with some nifty tools, I would have thought the human input/output alone is at least a full time job.

      • Clark

        Have any session musicians worked with Madness? Session musicians are very often competent jazz players, and Cross has an interest in jazz; maybe he stumbled into it that way. The world is connected in ways we would never guess.

        I’ve edited a page on “blood libel against the J ws”, a subject I know is used as a propaganda meme. I discovered something wrong and decided to fix it, but I’m sure some people will have read bias into my action.

        The plain fact is, we all have biases, and generally, we don’t see them as such. It’s an id-ego thing, inherent in the human condition.

        • Shatnersrug

          He was interviewed by the canary, it was common knowledge just like when Suggs announced his support for Jeremy, these things go round the labour twittersphere like no ones business, we need all the support we can get.

      • kashmiri

        Craig: He has Momentum on watchlist. Gets alerted whenever someone links to Momentum in any other article.

    • Richard C

      Exactly. All this tells you is that the Momentum is on Philip Cross’s watchlist. But that’s something.

      If you went through Philip Cross’s contributions to Wikipedia and looked at very time he swooped in to revert some change almost immediately it was made, you could probably reconstruct his watchlist quite accurately.

  • giyane

    How does James Bickerton manage to get only one photo of himself to come up on google images? Half the people want their name to rise to the top of the septic tank, but the other half seem to want to drain incognito through the overflow into the local stream.

  • Richard C

    I found the Twitter attack account “Media Lens Watch” @MLWatch among the followers of the @medialenswipe attack account mentioned in Craig’s last piece.

    This @MLWatch account is of course a friend of “Philip Cross” and not just on Twitter. As you can see from this tweet: https://twitter.com/MLWatch/status/779041826258972673 @MLWatch claims to be the (recently deleted) Wikipedia user Eclipsemullet.

    @MLWatch says (of “Philip Cross”): “you should thank him!!!! He keeps reverting my edits.” This is in reply to a MediaLens tweet https://twitter.com/medialens/status/779012537568358400 which shows “Cross” reverting Eclipsemullet’s edits thrice.

    You can still see Eclipsemullet’s talk page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Eclipsemullet

    His list of contributions is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Eclipsemullet

    Unsurprisingly, Eclipsemullet’s main efforts were devoted to smearing MediaLens and George Galloway. He also doesn’t like a certain Craig Murray.

    “Philip Cross” even had to intervene, with conspicuous leniency and gentleness, to revert his vilifications because they didn’t follow the “reliable sources” attack strategy that would comply with Wikipedia (mis)rules.

    Probably a different person from “Philip Cross” in my opinion … but on the same page.

  • gyges

    “I hope you are understanding the Jimmy Wales methodology by now.”

    Not meaning to blow you off course but the EU also behave like arbiters of truth as described in the law blog (blawg) post, https://inforrm.org/2018/05/17/the-problems-with-eu-measures-against-fake-news-emiel-jurjens-and-jens-van-den-brink/

    Digging deeper into the Dutch lawyers summons (link within the link above) of the EU, they argue that there is a breach of the ECHR article 10 rights.

    From what you’ve been describing over the last couple of days, it looks like “Philip Cross” is breaching ECHR article 10 and hence he (and Jimmy Whale) may be liable … perhaps if you seek legal advice?

  • teganjovanka

    I think the best summary of what’s going on so far is:

    – Jimmy Wales is a Blairite and on the board of the guardian, he’s perfectly happy with wikipedia been used as a tool to reenforce his world view.
    – Philip Cross is a deeply embedded admin there with knows all the arcane rules and can essentially act with impunity
    – Cross, either for money or because he’s a zealous believer, uses his insider status at wikipedia to do the bidding of a group of MSM journalists and political figures, all of whom share the same centrist/blairite outlook.
    – Cross will burnish their profiles, expunging negative material and put a positive spin on issues and events they promote
    – For left wing and anti-war figures, he will shit over their biographies, adding as much negative material as possible, and put a negative spin on the issues and events they promote.

    The question is, how many more are there like Cross, and who are they working for?

  • Rob

    The sad thing is that with Craig and others making such a fuss, Philip Cross will simply start up with another wiki name, or if he has any sense, use several names making his editing very hard to track.

    As for why Mr Cross would bother removing a reference to Momentum support from a pop band member, the answer is simple. It’s to stop a bandwagon. The Establishment doesn’t want you to know that other people including prominent ones support this left wing organisation which they like to portray as violent fanatics or a fringe movement.

    • Squeeth

      Is Momentum left wing? I thought it was a fiefdom organised on the fuhrerprinzip.

  • Sharp Ears

    I too heard the psychopathic liar speaking in his cracked voice to Mishal Hussain. A soft ball interview from Ms Hussain.

    ‘Craig Murray‏Verified account @CraigMurrayOrg · 39m39 minutes ago
    Craig Murray Retweeted BBC Radio 4 Today
    A categorical lie from Blair. The instruction to Straw to dismiss me as Ambassador for opposing intel from torture came from No. 10 following Manning discussions in Washington. As detailed in Murder in Samarkand (text fact-checked by FCO clearance and all their amendments made).

    Craig Murray added,
    BBC Radio 4 Today‏Verified account @BBCr4today
    I have always been wholly against any form of torture, says Tony Blair, speaking about the case of former Libyan rebel commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj #r4today ‘
    Timed 12.45am 22 May 2018?

    There are dozens of replies to the Radio4 tweet. Here is the clip of the liar’s words.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p067vzrh

    Also on Twitter.
    BBC Radio 4 Today‏Verified account @BBCr4today · 1h1 hour ago
    Former Prime Minister Tony Blair says he is “content” to go along with the government’s apology to Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar, who were victims of a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 #r4today

    BBC Radio 4 Today‏Verified account @BBCr4today · 3h3 hours ago
    Tony Blair says he is “content to go along with” the apology to Abdel Hakim Belhaj but says he did not know about the case until he Ieft office #r4today

    Liar! Liar!

    • Paul Barbara

      @ Sharp Ears May 22, 2018 at 11:53
      Hate to correct your spelling, but it’s Tony Bliar (unless he’s up in Bow Street Magistrates Court, on a charge (or charges) of importuning in Public Lavatories, in which case he got a fine as ‘Charles Lynton’ (his middle names). Protected by the PTB.
      And welcomed into the Catholic Church (who seem to just love Fascists, Nazis, Military Juntas and other War Criminals).
      Facts are still sacred, despite the Grauniad’s volte-face.
      Suspected of far worse, which the CIA (and other ‘Intel Agencies’, including a certain ME country’s, as well as ours), would, if true, been aware of and been able to wield as ‘inducements’ to join the US in it’s totally illegal War Criminal assault and occupation of Iraq, based on now acknowledged lies.
      Bliar, you would have been far better off sticking to guitar strumming (no matter that you were cr*p at it).

  • Roy Moore

    The reference to her parents’ conviction re-apperared briefly on her page, I see it’s now been edited back out.
    Thought control.

    • Clark

      Well try using it a different way then. Go to the article on the subject you’re investigating, click the article’s History, and scroll through looking for sections that have been removed; they stand out due to negative byte counts being displayed in red. Then click for the “diff” between old and current versions to see what has been removed; occasionally it’s information someone wanted hidden.

  • Rhys Jaggar

    Let us be absolutely clear here: widespread lies are printed/typed in the MSM, regurgitated on mainstream TV and radio. As a result, sources from the MSM are no badge of truth.

    Anyone who attended football matches with their eyes open know football journalists lie, misrepresent to order. Expensive flops are not criticised, party lines about particuar clubs are regurgitated. Five years watching Arsenal live left my contempt for sports journalists at an all time high. They are prostitutes, nothing better. No wonder independent blogs sprung up where reality was discussed a bit more often (until the blog owner said ‘forget truth, ad revenues are king!) Just look at the lies printed the past six weeks about Wenger’s replacement: prime reason to investigate is odds fixing at Betfair etc, allowing insiders to win big on volatility created by well planted lies, half truths and rumours. Arteta went miraculously from 90% certain to be appointed’ (quote from Daily Mail) to Emery being appointed in under 3 days. You are not telling me £50m transfer budget suddenly became a problem as lines of contract were being ironed out. That is laid down to candidates upfront, take it or leave it. A pathetic lie showing football up for what it is.

    Arteta was never 90% or Emery deal would have taken another 10 days. The Betfair scam would have seen laying Allegri at 1.5-2.0, backing Arteta at 20s down to 1.2 greening, whilst quietly backing Emery well above 2s. 10x your money in one month for criminals…..fully aided and abetted by the MSM.

    So the fact that Wikipedia considers MSM sources as unimpeachable suggests the Wiki brand needs critical evaluation, since if it cannot evaluate sources reliably, it should not be in the Encyclopaedia business…..

    • Resident Dissident

      IF you think the MSM are bad (and they are) you clearly have not looked at football rumour websites. Too many hours in the Library I’m afraid.

    • Nicky

      Rhys Jaggar, Manchester Utd / Glazer Family say no more and the vast sums of money being sent back to the US did it for me..

        • Nicky

          Resident Dissident, True but football has been ruined since the break way in the 1990’s .. fans have been used and manipulated by the owners and the club isn’t about the fans anymore its all about how much money they can get out of them ..

    • Paul Barbara

      @ Rhys Jaggar May 22, 2018 at 12:00
      Sorry to see you give a toss about footie (just a sec while I dive into my shelter to try to avoid the flack).
      ‘…As a result, sources from the MSM are no badge of truth….’
      Possibly true:
      ‘We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years……It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.’ David Rockefeller
      (Don’t expect a written record of this – it was supposedly said at a Bilderberg meeting in Baden, Germany in 1991)..’
      Agree, but conversely, they almost always steer their ‘punters’ in the ‘They’re’ direction, virtually always duplicitous.
      ‘Hey, Eve, take a bite of this apple’.
      By the bye, the above quote is often quoted as being by George H W Bush, who probably did parrot it.
      The evil b*stard is still chugging along, at 93, but must by now realise that when Jesus said: ‘What doth it profit a man (or a Bush) if he (it) gains the whole world, and suffers the loss of his soul?’ he was not just spouting just because he liked the sound of his own voice.
      I vonder if he has packed his asbestos underwear in his ‘getaway’ bag? He can leave the Krugerrand’s; St. Pete don’t work that way.
      Such a thing, already!

    • Jo Dominich

      Interesting post Rhys. I seem to remember some years ago that a Journalist wrote an article (I believe for The Times) about an important FA Cup match and, on account of the fact he hadn’t actually been there, wrote a completely erroneous report. The same has happened with Book Reviews and Film Reviews – they haven’t read the books and more often than you think, the reviews bear no relation at all to the actual book. There has been, at one point. quite extensive exposure of these journalists. So it isn’t just politics, as you said, it is Football/Sport, Films, Books and probably other arenas too.

  • Sharp Ears

    There have been several references to Wales being on the Guardian Board. Not as far as I can see.
    https://www.theguardian.com/gmg/2015/jul/23/gnm-board

    I do see Rebuck there. She published BLiar’s ‘A Journey’. Widow of Philip Gould the Labour Party’s Machiavelli.
    There is a daughter in the wings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Gould_(politician)

    Wales is not on the Scott Trust Board either. The owners of the Guardian and Observer.
    https://www.theguardian.com/the-scott-trust/2015/jul/26/the-scott-trust-board

  • Sebastian

    Well this thread is poking a hornets nest! Is Philip Cross/ B from Brockley / Whoever operating in all wikipedia languages ? I had thought to compare, for instance the entry for Gladio in english, with that in italian. But never got round to it. Feelings on the matter in Italy may be a little stronger and too well informed to put up with the anglosphere version!
    The matrix is really showing some very welcome signs of distress, to my eye!

  • Anthony

    Like the Tories and rightwingers everywhere, Labour’s lib-glob / neocon Right have grasped that they can only broaden their popularity by means of incessant lying and smearing. They have watched with dismay as, across Europe, “centre”-left parties suffer one electoral humiliation after another as the “centrist” message ceases to resonate with ordinary people. And they are aghast at the popularity of Corbyn’s policies compared to their own.
    The reaction has been a completely uninhibited rightwing lie and smear campaign as they desperately try and wrest back control of Labour. It is vital to them and their media surrogates that Corbyn be denied a fair hearing and that the public be denied opportunities to compare Corbyn’s pro-human policies with the Labour Right’s pro-corporate and pro-war policies.

    This “John Cross” wikipedia racket is just one of the lesser known operations in the big push. It shows we should no longer be surprised at the depths to which the Labour Right are prepared to go in order to try and save themselves, and kill any electoral alternative to neoliberalisml and warmongering. They have shown they have no more scruples when it comes to lying and smearing than the Tories.

    • Anthony

      *Oops, “Philip Cross”. John Cross is only a pro Arsenal propagandist.

  • Squeeth

    If Barson’s status isn’t citable to a reliable source, create one. Ask someone interested in Madness to publish an article and use that as a source. When PC deletes the reference because the source isn’t reliable he can be challenged. It’s a paradox that because Wiki writing has to be a description of what the RS contain (NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH) the truth can become a moveable feast. I bet that PC has access to a corp-0-rat media/state broadcaster programme/article/journal/book/PhD creation and storage system so that he (?) can always cite lots of sources treated as reliable by Wiki which are as honest or as bent as necessary. Look at how many citations are to rags like the Times, Graun, NYT etc.

  • Dumb Unicorn

    Being curious, I looked at the edits for Gary Webb’s wikipedia page which one of the commenters on here had mentioned.

    This didn’t necessarily apply to the PC edits*, but for many of the edits which ‘undid’ any text referring to suicide or multiple gun shots (basically any which could imply murder by the CIA), the changes were undone within minutes (some literally within a minute). That would imply that they have some sort of monitoring tool which triggers a response whenever someone makes a change of a particular type (i.e. one they don’t think is correct). *The PC edits were reasonably soon after the original change though, usually within a few hours.

    I would (naively) have assumed that Wikipedia is corrected as and when a ‘mistake’ is noticed by someone who is an expert on that subject, or by periodic checks that pages comply with standards. They can’t possibly police every single entry the minute it is added, can they? The ‘corrections’ for Gary Webb’s page looked to be human in nature in that they made subtle changes to the meaning (i.e. they weren’t all just straight deletions or grammatical corrections). That would imply to me that there are people literally waiting for someone to edit particular pages or comment on particular subjects so they can check they comply and undo if necessary.

    Perhaps they have some super clever program which automatically corrects ‘errors’ but even if they did, someone would have to decide what constituted an error and it would have to be specific to each page. For Gary Webb, someone would have to specify that for his particular biography, it can’t be suggested that it wasn’t suicide because the official verdict was suicide – that’s too vague a criterion to capture every combination of edit and undo it without human intervention.

    If I were to guess, I would say that they have some kind of monitoring tool which alerts a team of people whenever certain pages are edited, or certain key words are used. A human then manually decides whether to re-edit or undo the change in line with what they believe is ‘correct’.

    The real question though, is who decides which pages and which topics need to be policed.

    I did notice that PC seems to have a particular interest in conspriacy theory films which is a bit weird. I also noticed that many of PC’s edits are fairly benign, but happen on pages which could potentially be controversial. Does that perhaps fit with a theory that PC is being alerted when certain pages are updated and when he finds that the change isn’t controversial, he just amends any grammatical or factual errors?

    • Dumb Unicorn

      🙂 I’m sure other people have already mentioned it, but just noticed that PC is perhaps the ‘Wikipedia Police’, in the same way you get the ‘Grammar Police’ or the ‘Fashion Police’. Better watch though, the ‘Grammar Police’ soon morphed into ‘Grammar Na*is’.

      • Squeeth

        As long as you don’t put commas next to conjunctions, you can edit without me removing them.

        Chief Inspektor Squeeth of the Grammar Polizei. Move along now, there’s nothing to see here.

    • Dumb Unicorn

      I should have said before anyone jumps on my comment – I’m not saying anything about the correctness or otherwise of the suicide verdict. I didn’t know anything about Gary Webb before I looked at the page, this is just an observation on their editing methods.

    • Squeeth

      I found that any article adverting even tangentially to the zionist occupation of Palestine, RT or COMbbc were under constant watch. I got a three day ban for lifting the zionist cloak, in discussions with the neo-fascists who occupy the RT article.

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